Not since James Cameron's 2009'smasterpieceAvatar has there been such a struggle over the use of resources, and machine versus animal. That is one way you could describe this 39-second clip of a hawk defending its turf against a quadcopter drone flown by a puny earthbound human. Luckily a camera captured the whole thing, so we know who the real aggressor was. Operator Christopher Schmidt says the incident took place at Magazine Beach Park in Cambridge, Massachusetts and that, upon realizing what was about to happen, he quickly throttled down the Phantom FC40 quadcopter's props to keep them from injuring the bird (or worse).

Other bird-meets-drone encounters have not had such happy endings. Last year, another Phantom operator had his dronedive-bombed by a group of birds, that forced it into a crash landing. Just a few months before that, a quadcopter operator got into a serious scrum with a ravenin the middle of the desert. There were also these golfers, who had their beautiful sweeping panorama of their golf game cut short — just like the grass on the green — by a pair of geese that did not take kindly to the floating video sphere. No doubt all these outcomes are better than the fate of a micro-air-vehicle that was being used by researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. On its test flight, it mistaken for a snack by a local eagle.